That’s another summer gone…I’m anticipating all the things that autumn and winter bring – wrapping up warm, kicking the leaves, cider in a pub garden watching an autumn sunset, halloween, my birthday, christmas. I’m also looking forward to curling up with a good book all warm inside whilst it gets colder outside.
I’m also looking forward to seeing what these seasons bring out of me in terms of my writing – will I be writing more? Is there going to be more inspiration? I want to get the balance of my life right – enough time with friends and family, enough time to go out and enjoy myself, enough time to read and write.
Although this summer hasn’t been the best in my 24 years of existence, I’m thankful that I found an opportunity to get the ball rolling with my writing. I’ve written some pieces I’m proud of, and might take further. I’ve reclaimed my dream again, and took the long way around to get to it. Things have been up and down but now that I’m home again, I hope I won’t feel too stifled and still keep that freedom of imagination.
Anyway, there’s a new short story up here on the Showcase page if you want to read it – I promise you won’t be disappointed!
I haven’t been blogging much here recently; mostly, it’s just been life getting in the way. I wonder how writers manage, in this day and age, to juggle all the different responsibilities that come with modern life? I for one find it difficult – to find a space where I can just set my mind free without any interruptions, or finding a state of mind where I feel inspired enough to write. Lately I’ve been tired and uninspired.
Now I’m back in London, I’m hoping to get into some good habits with writing and taking note of the world around me. This week and next week are the last two weeks I have of this particular writing course. I’ve signed up for another one; the Open University Creative Writing course, which starts in October. There are a number of reasons why I decided to sign up. Mostly it’s just really wanting a challenge, to push myself and bring something out. I need more than a summer course, no matter how wonderful it’s been and very exciting.
I’ve proven to myself that I can write, that it’s something worth pursuing and something I enjoy doing. I love the satisfaction that comes of finishing a short story, the process of writing a poem and the process of learning how to edit something and polish it. Doing my dissertations in my degrees helped with the editing part; I’m a newsletter editor and now a book review writer for a magazine. I’m learning that I need to find the time to write each day. I need to get into a habit, to write even when I feel shit and nothing feels great.
Last week was scriptwriting and I turned ‘The Night Shift’ into a script. It worked really well, because the story was already well paced and had dialogue. It didn’t take long, but I had to work myself up into the right frame of mind to write it. Towards the end of my stay in Scotland, I was finding it more and more tense because I felt like I had outstayed my welcome. There was nowhere to write except the living room and kitchen – and people came in and out a lot. I found that my writing flows better in the evening rather than in the daytime.
For some reason the night lends itself to writing – you’re all cosy indoors and it’s more atmospheric. I suppose it depends where you are really. In London, I’m in a place high in the house (my converted attic room) writing at a desk that overlooks the treetops and the top floors of the houses across the way. We are lucky to live in North London – a bit like the ’suburbs’, I guess. It’s not central London, with too much noise and traffic. Yet it’s not so far out that you feel disconnected from things.
This week I’m writing 1000 words of autobiography – a self contained story from my life, that could also be a chapter in my actual autobiography. Thinking about it, my life possibly does lend itself to an autobiography (I’m not bragging, just thinking in terms of interesting things), since I’ve had things happen to me that might help other people. I’m deaf, and a feminist and have had to fight for things – in education, in my social life. I’ve had to be determined, to push my way through. All whilst being reserved and shy, and only building up my confidence after leaving University. University was hard – I didn’t really have any friends from the first time around.
My Masters degree was better – I met some lovely likeminded people who reminded me that the world really is a wonderful place for finding friends. I’ve had some amazing experiences – on stage, at chickenshed, finding my soulmate and meeting him for the first time, travelling and going on holiday. I’ve learnt not to take things for granted, as much as I possibly can. This has been learnt the hard way – money problems, family problems, struggles.
That’s the thing – everyone has a story to tell. I guess what makes a good read depends largely on the way people tell their stories. Even if I never try to publish my autobiography, I might just write it and publish it via blurb for my children and grandchildren to read.
Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth. (Hélène Cixous, 1976: 880)
This week in the creative writing course we were asked to do two things: listen to one of our favourite songs and describe how it makes you feel, why you like it so much, and what it is about. I wrote about ‘In The Shadows’ by The Rasmus because I have never really thought about why I like it so much. It is an anthem – something I love to listen to because it makes me feel both sad, angry and optimistic. And not so alone.
I had real trouble thinking about what I was going to write about in a Haiku, and decided this morning to write about my uncle, who died two years ago, suddenly. I’ve never written about my feelings or used them in a poem, because it is something that still affects me and my family. I was really concerned that it might be too morbid in terms of writing about death, but I’ve never been afraid to talk about or write about things that seem gruesome (have a look at The Night Shift…).
We live in a society where sometimes we are afraid to confront the reality of death – people don’t talk about it, feel that if we talk about it, it might result in outbursts and tears – and what is wrong with that? Particularly in the UK, it seems like we are afraid to show our feelings out of context (we can cry at funerals, but not two years later on the anniversary of someone’s death, perhaps). I feel that it’s healthy to talk about and show our feelings – showing them connects us to each other and allows pent up feelings to come out.
The Death of my Uncle
Letting go is hard
Cram my love on one small card
The white lilies glow.
You are a carnival –
A fusion and a melting pot.
Your shape is idiosyncratic;
An interweaving tapestry of the old and the new.
Your colours blur together,
And I’m dizzy, inspired.
You have an edgy head for business,
But at heart you crave anarchy.
Lit up, sparkling, you take my breath away;
Yet I travel within your rumbling belly every day.
You are a historical giant,
And you lead a youthful dance.
You wrap yourself in the finest culture,
Dripping with diamonds and stamping your heavy duty boots.
© Elizabeth Ward 2009
The other day, I just completed my first short story, since, well, when I was doing my GCSE’s. It came out differently than I expected; in fact, it delved into a completely different genre than I expected it to. My character loves to read mystery books, is an ex-police officer (after only three years serving she becomes disillusioned) and is a night warden for the village church. Oddly enough, I thought I would be writing a mystery story – something that tied to the characters’ interests. Instead, it wound up being a horror-fantasy story, set in a graveyard, with a sceptical character. I never cease to surprise myself sometimes…
I’ve set up a page where I’ll showcase some of my writing – the story is up already under the link ‘The Night Shift’ on the Showcase page. Just click on the tab at the top of the blog to find it. I’m hoping that as time goes on, I’ll post more stories, as I get used to writing prose and making things up 
I believe the creative writing course is going to veer towards poetry next week. This week involves using stories and ads in newspapers as inspiration. It should be interesting…
The creative writing course is going well so far: I’ve written three small pieces, but they are mostly descriptive, as opposed to a flight of fantasy. I’ve also been thinking about writing short stories and how I can submit them to competitions or writing magazines. It’s strange when inspiration strikes from what seems like nowhere; whether you use your everyday life or something you’ve observed. Or whether these ideas seem to come from nowhere and take you by surprise. I like to surround myself with things or try to find things that might inspire me even further. I have been reading Steven King’s ‘On Writing’ and have recently finished ‘Wannabe a Writer?’ by Jane Wenham-Jones. I have also bought a book called ‘The Sound of Paper’ by Julia Cameron, which is proving to be quite inspiring, even though I have only flicked through it and dipped in here and there.
I also stumbled across the Moleskine website, as well as We Heart It; images can be really inspiring and make you feel a whole lot more capable of creating something. This is why my room at home is so inspiring to me – I can look around and feel like the possibilities are almost limitless. Being here in Scotland is okay, but I’m finding the lack of my own space a bit trying at times.
I’ve sort of ‘claimed’ a corner of a sofa and stacked my books and notebooks around me. I don’t feel like this is ideal, but it will have to do for now, and I’m grateful that I even have any space at all. The wireless connection is amazing, and I’m now desperate to have one as it would mean freedom around the house!
I think it’s harder when you go looking for inspiration, but you need to keep an open mind. I started writing a short story based upon a man who keeps pigeons in his attic because I happened to notice that someone across the way actually has pigeons in his attic!
I started to think about what his life might be like and applied the ‘what if..’ rule. What if the reason he keeps pigeons is because he feels more comfortable with animals rather than humans? What if he fancied himself as a bit of an eco-warrior? What if he met a woman who was also very conscious of the environment and she taught him how to relate to humans? Thus I had a story that could happen…
I’ve also bought a little moleskine notebook – my first moleskine! I have loads of notebooks though, and they all have a purpose of some kind (even if that purpose only makes sense to me…). I’m going to use this one for noting down flashes of inspiration and ideas, to think about my writing and where it might be going.
I think I’ll avoid thinking about the ‘getting published’ part until I’ve actually created a few pieces and edited, polished and thought about them properly. This is why the creative writing course will be so good – it will give me the structure and framework within which I can think about my writing and why I write how I write. Hopefully it will also give me perspective about where my strengths and weaknesses lie, and what I can do to improve on these.
Today I’ve decided to get sorted with the feel and politics of the world I’m doing. As I mentioned in the last post, the world of the novel has a strongly dystopian feel (dystopia is opposite of utopia – kind of like Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty Four, The Handmaid’s Tale, etc). In some ways I feel like the world is a possible inevitable conclusion to where we are going right now in politics, in social values, in the treatment of social issues. Coming from an inclusive background, probably the result of growing up deaf and being a performing ex-member of Chickenshed theatre company, I feel that our world has become numb when it comes to social inclusion, social development.
My ideal world would be one where people saw the potential in each and every one of us, appreciated difference (race, gender, ability, sexuality), and understand that everyone has a skill, a way to contribute to the world; if only people were more open minded. This world now falls so short of this ideal. Maybe it is naive to expect people to be more open minded and accepting but a lot of it probably is about educating people, getting them to think outside the box. I think that is what places like Chickenshed aim to do – they draw on everyone’s talent and abilities, they try to get people to think outside the socially accepted way of thinking at any given time.
I am also drawn towards Feminist dystopian and utopian fiction: pieces such as The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood), Woman on the Edge of Time (Marge Piercy), He, She and It (Piercy), The Female Man (Joanna Russ), The Telling (Ursula K. Le Guin) and Herland (Charlotte Perkins Gilman). These books have inspired me to think outside the box when it comes to what feminist fiction looks like. Most of these books are within the science fiction and fantasy genre; a lot of dystopian and utopian books involve dreaming up other worlds and thinking about how these worlds would work, how big ideas can trickle down and affect everyday life. Dystopias often function as warnings or as a kind of idea of the natural progression of things if we continue to carry on in a particular vein. Feminist Science Fiction is often strongly utopian or dystopian in flavour.
This is probably why I get so enthused about SF&F – the idea that anything goes. In some respects, I feel that these genres are natural offshoots of fairy tales, of supernatural creatures, magic and human dreams. It isn’t just about spaceships, elves and epic battles. SF&F, like fairy tales, often have an overarching theme or morality they want to explore. I enjoy reading Urban Fantasy books, but sometimes they don’t fulfil my need to explore a particular issue, theme or political/social problem.
You could argue that they don’t need to explore these sort of things; I agree because fiction can just be pure escapism, without any worry of having to wrap your head around politics or human right issues. Yet when I read Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse Vampire Mysteries, I am struck by how social issues and politics are explored, even if it isn’t immediately obvious. A lot of the focus is sometimes on how a supernatural character interacts on a social and political level with other supernatural characters – in werewolf packs, in relation to other werewolf packs, vampire kings and queens and so on.
So even though the world I am crafting in my book is at the beginning stages, I do know that I want to explore social and political issues because they affect all the characters in the books. There are underground groups lobbying for human right issues, for supernatural issues. The government has become a kind of military and totalitarian state, employing heavy surveillance. It may be that I need to immerse myself in ideas of how surveillance works, how it affects our lives already.
I’ve already hinted at how almost every country has entered a state of lockdown where it is very difficult to leave or enter. Immigration laws are heavy handed and discriminatory. Sexism has ceased to be subtle and is now much more overt, whilst the evidence of racism is more obvious – with immigrants in particular. To be more realistic, it will take thinking about the timelines of these occurences – how far into the future is this all taking place? About twenty years from now would be plausible because the main character’s mother was in her twenties in this time (2009) and the main character is in now in her mid to late twenties after doing a PhD. I will need to plot out both the political and social timeline as well as a vague sketching of the character’s timeline to the present in the novel.
I would like the novel to be focused on the character because she is someone that I hope the reader will enjoy getting to know. She has no formal training in using guns or weapons etc, but she is involved with underground movements in a knowledge capacity. Being a journalist, she is inclined towards being curious and inquisitive about people and their lives, about the meaning behind people’s actions. Yet she is not part of the mainstream media and this gives her more freedom to engage in activist work (seeing as the media is in the hands of the government and media conglomerates).
People are surprised by her; being deaf, she is not expected to know as much or do as much as she does. The first chapter is revealing in this respect – it begins to set the scene, the place the action starts to happen, the voice of the character comes out, and we start to get an insight into what things are like when you interact with the world, being a deaf person. We also get a taste of the restrictive and paranoid conditions of living in this particular time; what has led to such a change.
The mother functions as us – she was around during this time, she has been through the changes leading to the present day of the novel. We also get a sense of tragedy in the character’s life – the death of her father, the reluctance to talk about it with us. Most of all, I want to give the reader a sense of emotional attachment to the character, some sense of empathy.
A main character can be both a guide through the world and a good friend, someone we want to get to know more about. Sara is someone who covers up her sadness with a sense of sarcastic wit, with a facade. This is both paranoia of the time and a desire to cover up her secrets and her emotion. As a result, she comes across to others as a slightly standoffish and quiet person. Only time will tell how she develops and what she reveals to me and perhaps to others if/when the novel gets finished and maybe published.
The other characters that I’ve written so far are Sara’s mother, grandmother and two sisters, as well as three men that offer a hint of the supernatural and of exciting things to come. I think in the next few chapters, something will happen (I don’t know what) to do with the student she meets outside the library and her encounter with the shapeshifter. Perhaps the early days of writing a novel is the most exciting, but I’m really looking forward to seeing where everything goes. I want to try and avoid cliches and pitfalls that arise when writing fantasy; therefore I will try not to channel any other authors or fiction that I’ve read (even though this is unavoidable, since we are all cultural animals).
I’m hoping, in the next few weeks, that as well as doing my writing course, I will be able to focus somewhat on writing different parts of the novel, and starting to build up on the knowledge I have of the world already. Character profiles are also something I want to think about, so watch this space!
N.B. Picture by Augustin Sirai (found on FFFound).
Giving my characters a back story is probably one of the most interesting things about writing the novel I’m doing at the moment. Even though I’ve only written about a chapter and a half (the first chapter coming to 19 pages and the second two and a half so far), I’ve written more through trying to think about the characters and their lives, what they think or feel about certain things, and how they have ended up in the present circumstances in the novel.
I’ve been angsting a bit about whether a novel takes careful planning or if it’s okay to just be free and easy, letting the character dictate where the story goes and where it might end up. Up until now I’ve been doing a mixture of both; trying to get a feel for the era of the story, what the politics are like, how I can show these politics and social circumstances in action. When I wrote the first chapter, I just wrote and the big ideas came when I started looking back over the chapter, editing and thinking about it.
It is just a first draft, obviously, so it isn’t by any means the definitive version of how it will end up. I’m coming to think of the first draft as an experiment, as a way of testing raw ideas and how they might be shaped into something bigger and more polished. I’ve found it easier to improvise rather than say ‘this is where the story is going’. My way of working might change as time goes on, especially if I want to set myself deadlines.
I’m working on the larger ideas of the story at the moment, and so the stuff I’m writing at the moment has become something of a mix of big ideas and the everyday effects of those ideas (for example, surveillance culture would result in people stopped and searched or asked to show their ID cards, etc).
A lot of what I’ve been thinking about, the political issues and social issues, I want to come out in the everyday life of the main character – newspaper articles, paranoia, scrambled internet connections, ID cards, mistrust. My main character at the present time is a journalist, so she doesn’t have a problem meeting people for interviews but at the same time puts safeguards in place such as arranging to meet a friend afterwards (if something went wrong, the friend would know).
It would be a good idea to research all these issues as they stand now and try and figure out the progression of these things – both in a dystopian and utopian way. It is like looking at things as either being half full or half empty; hopefully my world will incorporate both dystopian elements and a focus on overcoming such negative elements.
The supernatural element adds another layer; a political dystopia becomes a dystopian urban fantasy. I’m not sure if it will work; but testing the boundaries of fiction and imagination is something that keeps people interested. Improvisation is something I’m enjoying, it keeps me guessing where the character will go next. I’ve been toying with the idea of using flashbacks to explore a characters past story or changing the viewpoint to another character.
However, I think the premise of the story is that my character is the means through which I want to explore this particular world. In the first place, she was the reason I started the story, so I do think it will remain character driven, even though there will be an exciting story.
I think the next post will be about the research I’m doing and need to do – a place where I put all the scraps of research together – the links, the newspaper articles, the idealism. Particularly I want to think about why I want to look at things like sexism, racism and ableism. So much of what we see in the media at the moment verges on the side of ‘moral panic’, or a sort of mild conservatism.
Such things as the BNP having two seats in the EU parliament, immigrants being treated like second class citizens, and an undercurrent of subtle sexism and ableism. There is more pressure than ever for women to conform to certain standards, and there is now a huge backlash against feminism in general.
Part of this could just be a general ignorance of what feminism actually is, but at times it seems that there is a misrepresentation of feminism as ‘man-hating’. I feel that exploring these misperceptions and backlashes against human right issues is something that I want to do, no matter on how small a scale, in a work of fiction.
N.B. The image is by Pink Sherbet Photography via a creative commons license.
